


Visitation

by musamihi



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-08
Updated: 2012-12-08
Packaged: 2017-11-20 15:56:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/587097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/musamihi/pseuds/musamihi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Greg visits Sherlock's grave on Christmas Eve, and meets more than he expected.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Visitation

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for alcohol abuse and discussions of suicide.

The car idled on the empty service path. In the darkened cemetery, the low, pulsing hum of its engine was the only sound; it drifted through the clear, frozen air and hung beneath the conifers' low-reaching branches. The headlights shone toward the heavy metal gate the caretaker had opened on the strength of the word _POLICE_ emblazoned across the bonnet, and leaning against the boot, with nothing but the yellow glow of the taillights and the colourless reflection of the moon for illumination, Greg worried the cap of his whiskey bottle between his thumb and the palm of his hand.

He was drunk. The plan had been to come and pour one out, as they said, for an old friend. But the little puddle of whiskey had long since soaked through the grass and into the earth packed above Sherlock's body, and he was still here, and still drinking. He knew he wouldn't be able to drive. He could call someone, of course, or even get on the radio; even if nobody was quite as understanding these days as they had been in March when his marriage had split or in June when Sherlock had broken himself (and Greg's career) wide open, someone would still come fetch him, and like as not the only consequences he'd have to suffer would be the hangover. In his thirty years on the force he'd made a lot of friends, and none of them would put him in on Christmas Eve.

But his mobile stayed put in his pocket, and the radio was dark. Greg stood and stared at the faint outline of that headstone against the grey sky, and wondered – wrapped up in the dead cold, in the hot, stupefying sting of liquor, in the seductive scent of carbon monoxide – wondered what it might be like just to sleep there. Things slept under the earth all the time, and they pushed off the weight of the ground and came up in the spring, green and weak but very much alive. The word _buried_ sitting on his tongue still brought to mind _treasure_ , not _corpse_. It had been six months since Sherlock had disappeared into a grave, and still it was difficult not to believe he would turn up again, even though Greg knew it as well as he knew he would wake up tomorrow in his own empty bed.

He hadn't always known.

It seemed years ago now that he'd stood at that weather beaten seawall in Majorca, resting his elbows on the yellow, soft-looking stone and looking out at the calm, grey ocean. The remembered warmth made his toes uncurl in his shoes for just a moment, a phantom feeling. Behind him had stretched a pleasant, sandy hill culminating in the sweet little hotel where Anna was crying in their bathroom; before him the white beach shrinking under high tide and the flat, endless plane of water disappearing into a hazy horizon. He had only to step around the wall to wet his feet. And he'd done so, after half an hour of watching the sea come inexorably closer, of struggling with the fear that would have directed him back to the hotel room, back to Anna, back to the steady misery of a marriage he'd grown so accustomed to. Perhaps it would have been better if he'd never had to find out how much he would sacrifice to have someone to come home to, someone to wake up with, someone to call his own even if the designation came with one hell of an asterisk.

He'd hauled himself over the stone fence, planting his palms on the smooth ridge of it and launching himself across with less grace than he'd done twenty years ago when they'd been on honeymoon. Free, exposed, without direction – he'd landed in the soft, hot sand and for the first time in a long time looked toward England (or where he supposed England was, judging by the sun) with more pleasure than trepidation. The water had pooled into the depressions under his heels and he'd felt as though he could almost swim the distance home.

And for a couple of months, he'd been almost happy – Anna was gone, of course, but it was better to know she was gone than to be constantly wondering. Bachelor life had taken a good deal of getting used to, and he doubted it would ever truly suit him, but there was always the work. And there was Sherlock, a friend no matter what else he was, a force who had always found his way into Greg's life just in time to give him a shot in the arm. Among the caustic complaints and insults and impatience, Sherlock always managed somehow to make him feel as though he were accomplishing something significant. He didn't know how it worked; he wasn't given to studying these things. He only knew that when he was with Sherlock, he felt he mattered. 

Maybe that was what he'd come to seek here – some of that old sense that he could _do_ things. It had abandoned him at the same time Sherlock had. Had he come to find it again? 

He drained the narrow, flask-like bottle, and pushed it with a rush of combined shame and anger into his trouser pocket. Even drunk – he caught himself on the boot as he stumbled in his attempt to stand off the car – he knew there was nothing to find here. A dead body, the powerless remains of a man he'd imbued with too much meaning, too much hope. There was nothing to be gained by wallowing, and he knew it. Whatever he'd lost with Sherlock, he wouldn't find it in the ground.

Even so, the shape of Sherlock's dark, unassuming headstone called to him like the outline of a face or a body contorted in pain, symbols coded so deeply into the brain that non-recognition was impossible, that a failure to feel the grip of sympathy would have been subhuman. He forced himself to walk toward it, his steps lurching and unsteady. Just in time to stop himself from pitching face-first into the grass, he laid his hand on it – on the cold, black, preternaturally smooth stone. Its blank face stared up at him, and he shuddered; the name, carved and gilded on the opposite side, hung in his mind like a branch swinging in a storm, and as he stumbled around the stone to face it properly, he half expected sand and sun and a wide, impassable sea.

"Would you mind standing a _bit_ to the side? Really."

The voice was like a car backfiring in the silence – sudden, deep, bursting through Greg's body like the whiskey slamming through his bloodstream. He looked up from where he was clinging to the corner of the headstone and the ground seemed to tilt beneath him. There was a man – shadowed, cast in black and silver by the moon. He stood a few paces off, wrapped in a pea coat and a dark, bulky scarf, and Greg felt a jolt in his stomach at the thought that he might fall off the sloping, spinning scene.

The man approached. His hair was black, just a little too long, tousled, achingly familiar, and his chin was tucked severely down over his muffler. He had Sherlock's face and posture and private, smug, not altogether unkind slip of a smile. "You're not supposed to stand _on_ a man's grave," he continued, gesturing sharply to one side with his hand.

Greg looked down to where his feet were planted in the very slight dip extending out in front of Sherlock's headstone, and thought that he'd heard that somewhere, that it was disrespectful – because of course there was a body six feet under there, unmoving and unknowing, but eternally, physically present. He shuddered and moved clumsily back to lean against the adjacent tree, his eyes pinned as firmly as he could keep them on the man's vague shadow.

He wondered whether somehow he'd got himself drunk enough to hallucinate. A half pint of whiskey had never done that to him before, but there was no other explanation. _Once you've eliminated the impossible …_ His stiff, numb hands clung to the rough bark at his back, and he shut his eyes and tried to slow his breathing. Every freezing stab of air into his lungs made him feel, for a split second, just a little more sober – but the sensation never lasted long, leaving him whirling and disoriented in his own mind after every exhalation.

There were footsteps in the frosted grass. "You're afraid," the voice said, with Sherlock's little grace notes of incredulity, of frustration. 

Greg opened his eyes and forced himself to turn his face up. The face was closer now, and it was _his_ face, a face he'd spent enough time studying – at crime scenes, waiting and hoping for answers, at Baker Street, praying for an agreeable expression, or just in the street, letting himself dwell on the shape and position of his mouth. He would know it anywhere. And yet, here it was, and the only thing on his tongue was a question: "Who are you?"

"Oh, God. You _would_ believe in ghosts." Sherlock stepped forward, his exasperation so absolutely familiar that Greg gave up attempting to deny it. If this was a hallucination, he was sorry he hadn’t brought anything more to drink. "I didn't come here to frighten you," Sherlock continued, more gently, with just a shade of quiet remorse. He straightened Greg's skewed, half-open coat for him. "You smell like the inside of a glass."

"Then why did you come?" Whatever he was talking to, it sounded nice; it sounded better than silence and the dull, idling engine and his own claustrophobic spiral of thoughts. 

"I came to pay a friend a visit." Sherlock fitted an arm behind Greg's back, getting a solid grip around his ribcage, and began easing him forward. "I didn't expect to find you, too – now, come on, let's get you sitting down before you kill yourself. No – what did I _just_ say?" Sherlock sighed as Greg stumbled across his grave, trying and largely failing to keep his weight against the supporting arm. 

Greg felt his knee sink into the damp, freezing mud. Sherlock bent to help him up, and for a moment Greg felt as though he was looking into an endless recurrence of mirrors – Sherlock above him, pulling up, and Sherlock below him, dragging him down into the ground. "There's no one down there," Greg said, mostly to hear himself say it; the idea was as warm and as soft as a snow bank to the despairing. 

"Isn't there? Just – come on."

Together they made their slow, halting way back to the car. Greg rested against the boot again as Sherlock opened one of the rear doors, and then they were bundling clumsily, awkwardly inside, Sherlock shoving Greg across the length of the bench seat to rest against the far door. It wasn’t warm, but the heat was running and it was at least less sappingly frigid than the air outside. Greg leaned his head back, the irresistible pull of sleep sinking through him like syrup through water. He struggled against it, forcing his eyes open, focusing on the arc of the steering wheel to keep himself grounded. Sherlock was fussing with something just out of his field of vision, but Greg could feel his hip - cold and hard through the fabric of his coat - pushing against his in the cramped space. Then there were fingers against his face, surprisingly warm, turning his chin as something soft and bulky was pushed behind his neck. 

“What was your plan, exactly?” Sherlock asked, as he shrugged casually out of his coat and then draped it back over his shoulders like a mantle. He leaned heavily against Greg’s side, so much warmer now that the barrier between them had been removed - so much warmer than Greg had ever remembered him. “You thought you’d come get absolutely pissed, and - then what? You haven’t changed, have you? Hopeless.”

Greg turned his head slowly to look him in the face, to drink in that impatiently twisted mouth, the dim pallor of the face he’d only recently seen in accusatory tabloid photos. It couldn’t be real; none of this could be, but he wouldn’t ask what was happening. He wouldn’t start digging for the truth. This might crumble under examination, and - like everything Sherlock had ever given him - he chose not to question it too closely lest he should find some flaw that would deprive him of his elegant solution. Over the years it had grown into trust, and while he couldn’t quite trust this, he wanted it very much. He would be still, he would be agreeable, he would accept what he was given and perhaps, for once, he would be able to keep it.

“That was as far as the planning went,” Greg admitted, his hand slow and imprecise as he reached up to grip Sherlock’s lapel. He smiled; it felt stupid, uncontrolled. Sherlock’s weight against him was a welcome prop, more solid than the sea wall, the headstone. “And then you turned up. As usual.”

Sherlock snorted. “Yes, I really ought to stop swooping in at the last moment to fix your problems. You’ve learned bad habits.”

Greg shut his eyes. In the swooping, drunken darkness all he could hear was the thrum of the engine, the rustling of woolen fabric, and Sherlock’s slightly irregular breath, shuddering with the cold. “I’m learning new ones,” he said. They weren’t good habits, but there was no need to articulate his descent, even if he could have. Not to Sherlock, would would be disappointed - if perhaps not surprised - and not to himself, who knew it all too well without forming the words. 

“I can see that.”

Greg could see nothing, and chose to keep it that way - if he looked, he would only run the risk of seeing something disappear. He chose simply to listen, and to _know_ for the few stupified minutes before he dropped into something more resembling torpor than sleep, that he was not alone.

***

Greg woke early; the sun made itself known only through the grey creeping up past the clouds obscuring the eastern horizon. His head felt at once too hot and splitting cold, which he realized after several sluggish moments was because he was leaning half against the foggy, frozen window. His neck was tight and twisted to one side, wedged against the hard back of the seat, and every part of him throbbed with the knowledge that moving would bring pain. His stomach rebelled against the very thought of sitting up.

He was, he realized, still drunk - and in the same moment, he knew that he was the only man in the car.

Straightening - very carefully - he slid across the cold, empty seat beside him and shoved it open. It had been wedged ajar with his wallet, of all things; he stuffed that back into his pocket and hauled himself out into the wet morning air. Behind him, he knew, Sherlock’s headstone was a dark mark against the grass, but he steadfastly refused to turn and look on it. He jerked the driver’s door open and threw himself into the seat, glad to be forced to put every ounce of effort he possessed into moving without retching, and switched on the defroster. As the windows became slowly more transparent, the headstone became unavoidable, reflected in his mirrors, imposing itself relentlessly on his fragile, confused memory of the night before - an indisputable sign that he had dreamed, that none of the warmth he thought he’d taken to sleep with him had been real. _Sherlock Holmes_ was literally carved into stone, dead, buried, gone. 

And Greg was impervious to the cold, already numb. He felt nothing as he gripped the steering wheel, looked at his own wretched reflection, and wondered where the hell he was even going to go - but then the obnoxious, repetitive chiming informing him that he’d left the back door ajar filtered through the dead haze surrounding him. With a muttered oath he fumbled with the door and stumbled out again, heaving the offending door open so he could slam it to -

And there in the footwell, on the worn, black carpet, among the mess his muddy shoes had made the night before, was a footprint - too large, too narrow to be his. He stared, wetting his chapped lips with his tongue, his hand white and rigid on the doorframe. The story written in earth on the floor of the car was one he didn’t need Sherlock to help him read, and yet it was impossible, wasn’t it? 

Or, at the very least, highly improbable.

He drove away, forcing himself to look forward, and not at the dwindling track of mud his tyres left on the service road as he passed through the gates and out into the street.


End file.
